While it was underway, the brutal and chaotic Spanish Civil War was already being cast in contradictory ways by its leading participants. It was represented as an opportunity to lament injustice and the travesty of democracy, marshalled as positive proof that the European continent was in fact under the live threat of communist revolution, cast as a story of brutal anti-clericalism gone rampant and narrated as the battle between close-minded traditionalism and open-minded modernity. These contradictory understandings of the Spanish Civil War far outlived the conflict's conclusion in 1939 and have been played out repeatedly across the decades through the historiography. Thus, the Spanish Civil War has been represented by scholars as the fight between dictatorship and democracy, between religion and anti-clericalism and between conservative nostalgics and forward-looking modernisers. All of these narratives have some grain of truth to them. But what is so exciting about the up and coming generation of scholarship on the Spanish Civil War is that it asks new questions and provokes us to think beyond pre-existing tropes. In my contribution to this forum, I will focus in particular on one facet of this new scholarship, which is centred on the attempt to situate Spain and the Spanish Civil War within a wider, transnational, framework.
A sceptical reader might respond that efforts to transnationalise or internationalise the Spanish Civil War are as old as the conflict itself. This is a valid point: early primary source reports on the Spanish Civil War emphasised the international character of the volunteer forces on both sides. The contribution of foreign governments (Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union) to the war is well known. As a result, the first international histories of the Spanish Civil War focused on one of two stories: the diplomatic story, according to which Franco's victory in the war was enabled by Nazi-fascist assistance, and the civil society story, according to which the Spanish Civil War ignited enthusiasms on both sides of the Atlantic, and led to an outpouring of material support, press coverage and, in some cases, the decision on the part of non-Spaniards to leave the comfort of their homes and pick up arms for one or the other side.
The animating questions underlying the early international diplomatic histories centred on who won and how they won. In this first wave of the historiography, moralism was not eschewed. On the contrary, much energy was spent on questions of culpability, that is, on ascribing blame to one or the other side. The declaration of neutrality in the conflict on the part of several major powers – a decision which, in retrospect, did quite likely doom the republican cause – was repeatedly cited as a major instance of cowardice, hypocrisy or worse. Similarly, scholarship showing the contributions of the Soviet Union to the conflict aimed to overturn the idea that the only relevant story here was of Nazi-fascism throwing its weight behind Franco.
The first wave scholarship on the international volunteers who flocked to Spain for the civil war was animated by similar questions. In addition to emphasising the question of who won and how, the issue was also about how thorough that victory should be understood to be. In a nutshell, early scholarship on the International Brigades and other like-minded groups often aimed to demonstrate the groundswell of popular support for the republic – a groundswell that had an important international dimension. In keeping with the blame ascribing tendencies in the first wave of scholarship, the implication of this finding was that if only the governments in a series of major European countries (as well as countries in North, Central and South America) had listened to the will of their people, then the Spanish Civil War would have turned out otherwise.
The newer generation of scholars has put some of these questions on hold. This does not, importantly, mean entirely eschewing the issue of who is responsible for the war, who won and how. But for the newer generation of scholarship, situating Spain in the wider world means something more than providing a social-intellectual history of international volunteers, or emphasising the diplomatic history story that made the Spanish Civil War neither solely Spanish nor solely a civil war. Broadly speaking, new work transnationalising the Spanish Civil War falls into three arenas. It demonstrates that it is imperative to understand the Spanish Civil War as a conflict that has much to do with imperial logics and nostalgias, it investigates the civil war itself as a stage for warring civil society internationalisms and it looks at the impacts of the civil war on Spain and the world through a decidedly international lens.
As a new generation of historians has turned to the question of what caused the civil war, they have recast the lead-up to the Spanish Civil War within the framework of imperial history. They have done so by presenting the drumbeat that ultimately led to Franco's coup as a response (among other things) to Spain's humiliating defeat in Morocco. Relatedly, recent scholarship has investigated how the normalisation of extreme acts of violence carried out in the colonial context facilitated their redeployment on home territory between 1936 and 1939. Emphasis has been placed on continuity of personnel: that is, the extent to which Franco and his core group of army generals were formed in the bowels of colonial warfare. Scholars in this camp (such as Ali Al Tuma, in this special issue) have also considered the fact that the demonisation and racialisation of the ‘other’ – a process which became increasingly bound up with so-called racial science from the late nineteenth century – impacted the vehemence with which the rebels depicted their perceived ‘enemies’, that is, Jews and communists, as well as their early attempts to carry out a violent, exclusionary pattern of state and nation building. The larger framework for this analysis has been established by scholars like Anthony Anghie, Mark Mazower and Isabel Hull; the scholarship is still only beginning to investigate its applicability to the Spanish case.
Taking an international or transnational history approach to the Spanish Civil War has also enabled a recasting of the conflict itself. Thus, some of the new scholarship looks at the Spanish Civil War as a major enabler of ‘transnational anti-fascism’, as a movement that brought together an ideologically heterogeneous group of communists, anarchists, socialists and liberals. Whereas anti-fascism had existed before in local country contexts and in exile communities (notably in Switzerland and in France), the Spanish Civil War galvanised a newfound unity across resistors of fascism worldwide). Relatedly, scholarship in this vein has sought to reemphasise the role of transnational anarchist anti-fascists in particular, who not only strengthened their connections in the course of the civil war but were also able to (briefly) put in place their visions for the good society in the course of the late 1930s.
Scholars have also brought new attention to the linkages not only between the international left but also between the international right. In this vein, scholars have investigated how Nazi-fascist groups used soft power to disseminate particular visions of the Spanish Civil War. They have looked at how youth organisations with strong international and transnational ties like Catholic Action took up the Spanish cause. They have thought carefully about ‘Axis internationalism’ as a distinct actor's category. Suddenly, the story is no longer one of left-wing civil society vs. Nazi-fascist military power, but instead a tale pitting international civil society groups against one another. Seen in this light, the Spanish Civil War is a particularly brutal manifestation of a series of internationalisms that emerged in the years after the First World War.
The Spanish Civil War also plays a signal role in recent attempts to bring the history of Catholicism and the Catholic Church back into the history of the twentieth century, as I have argued in A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican's Battle to Remake Christian Europe (2019). The war broke out on the heels of the crucial decision of the central government of the Roman Catholic Church to name itself as the leader of a transnational anti-communist crusade. Within this new cultural and ideological framework, the Spanish Civil War came to assume epic proportions, as the church cast the battle as a large-scale, transnational contest for influence between ‘Godless’ communism and theocentrism. The church disseminated this vision of the conflict with great alacrity across not just Western Europe, but also in Central and Eastern Europe, and in North and South America as well. In doing so, the church would impact not just the motivational structures of many volunteers on the nationalist side, it would also enable a new framing of history, cast as the battle between the forces of Christianity on the one side and the heathens on the other.
A particularly exciting exploration of how the Spanish Civil War helped birth novel forms of right-wing internationalism has been carried forth by one of the organisers of this forum. Through Franco's Internationalists: Social Experts and Spain's Search for Legitimacy (2019), David Brydan demonstrates that the Francoist social state began to take shape within one internationalist framework (the framework of Axis internationalism), only to develop a new internationalist framework (Catholic internationalism) after the Second World War. As Brydan shows, basing himself on material gathered in nearly twenty archives spread over six countries, it is quite simply wrong to present Franco's Spain as an isolated outcropping impervious to larger trends and unable to galvanise international attention and solidarity in the 1940s and 1950s. To the contrary, throughout this period Franco's regime worked to send its leading scientists and economists across Europe and United States, as well as to Africa and Latin America, in a bid to present Spain as a positive international force, particularly around issues of international health and development. In addition to challenging the notion that internationalism was exclusively the preserve of the left, Brydan's monograph shows us that the deployment of terms like ‘social justice’, ‘human rights’ and ‘economic development’ enabled Spain to enter the international community despite its continuation of a harshly repressive dictatorship. In other words, it was not just the geopolitical exigencies of the Cold War and NATO that brought Spain back into the fold, it was the country's ability to speak the words of the moment and take action in ways that rhymed with liberal internationalism's post-war priorities. What is so striking about Franco's Spain in the 1940s and 1950s, Brydan shows, was its ability to play this role while simultaneously building up its reputation as the leader of an internationalist and transnational Catholic right.
The final sense in which the Spanish Civil War has been placed in an international context by the recent historiography pertains to the memory of the war. A recent generation of scholars has looked at how the Spanish Civil War was not just an international matter between 1936 and 1939 but instead how its memory remained a transnational affaire for the better part of the twentieth century. Thus, scholars like Kirsten Weld have investigated how left- and right-wing forces in countries like Guatemala and Chile held the Spanish Civil War ‘in their hearts’ and made repeated appeals to the legacy of the war in their own internal struggles for power, cultural influence and military prowess. Looking more narrowly at the case of Spain, scholars like Michael Richards have investigated Spain's memory wars and how those wars not only continue to this day but also relate to parallel memory wars fought in neighbouring countries over the history of Italian fascism, German Nazism and the Holocaust.
Spain is often cast as far away and over there – as a country that remained backwards and traditional far beyond the time when other countries bounded ahead. However, as the wave of new international and transnational historical scholarship demonstrates, Spain is less the exception than the rule. Whether it came to how Spain grappled with its colonial legacy (and how imperial racism and violence showed up in ugly ways on Spanish soil), or whether the issue at hand touches on Spain as a staging ground for the warring internationalisms post-First World War, what emerges from these new histories is a tale of Spain as a country that exemplifies broader trends, rather than bucking them. One hopes that the future generation of scholars will continue to pursue the project of situating Spain in the wider world, investigating the extent to which this supposedly back water country in fact perfectly embodied so many of the painful tensions of the past century, and of our current one as well.
